I really wish this city would get its shit together about recycling. Just this morning I went to put my garbage in the collection bin for our building and it was over flowing with corrugated shoe boxes and moon cake tins, all stuff that could easily have been placed in the recycling bins RIGHT NEXT TO the trash bin.

I used to live in Japan in a low rise apartment. Not as much high rise estates that provide concierge and clubhouses and all that kind of shit in Japan, just a basic apartment. I remember having to split my rubbish into burnable, non-burnable and maybe plastic bottles or something like this and just dump it on the street on the specified day. No need to pay anything. But I remember there being a lot of rules that people followed quite strictly such as having to remove caps from bottles, having to dump it at a specified time of day and not too early, etc. I never really bothered to do so strictly and I used to have little old ladies harassing me for not following the rules and in the end I resorted to taking the rubbish out after midnight when the little old ladies were asleep .

Recycling is... well, it's not an excuse or a very good system itself. Hong Kong throws away around 4-5 MILLION plastic bottles a DAY. So, if everyone cleanly recycled all those plastic bottles, where does that leave us? Recycling plastic is expensive and involves transportation and processing, and at the moment oil is cheap enough that it's cheaper to just make new plastic. So there's not much desire for that cleanly recycled plastic. But even still, what on earth could we produce with 4 million plastic bottles a day?! I mean, what do we need to consume/build so much of that we can make use of all that recycled material? It's just a bad system. We need to stop it from entering our lives in the first place, as once it's here, it's here for hundreds of years before it breaks down.

Metals and paper, can be put to better use when recycled, and sadly it seems there is still a lot of needed education on this. I once tried to hand my metals directly to a FEHD worker so she could take what she needed for herself to get cash back, but when she saw cat food tins (not aluminum) she took them and threw them in the main rubbish stream.

Japan seems to be meticulous about keeping things tidy and following rules in ways that could benefit improving our own waste system. But they burn almost everything don't they? I was really disappointed by how many take-away bento box options there are, all with plastic. Or everything is wrapped in plastic bags or plastic containers. I had higher hopes for Japan...

Anyway, most important thing is just to reduce our waste and change our habit to be so dependent on "convenience" of single-use packaging. Supermarkets here have so much room for (simple) improvement. But so do people, and so do restaurants and (fish/veg) markets, which are still relying on Styrofoam. Who the heck wants to eat hot food out of a Styrofoam container anyway?!

Surely this whole thing unenforceable in a city like HK where almost everyone lives in high rises. We don't leave our rubbish outside our front doors here. What's going to happen? Will the cleaning ladies demand that we all confess and identify our incorrectly bagged rubbish? Ain't gonna happen.

Instances such as commuters having to carry an empty coffee cup all the way to their workplace after failing to find a litter bin have become a regular occurrence, since the measured rate system in which garbage must be disposed of in specified trash bags was introduced in South Korea back in 1995.